Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 31, 2004
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Today is Halloween. I expect to spend the evening having small children in supposedly scary costumes--they will be truly scary if they include masks of the Presidential candidates, but never mind--ringing my doorbell and driving my poor dog stark-raving nuts. I may turn off all the outside lights and all the upstairs lights, that can be seen from the street, and spend the evening hiding out downstairs in the interest of Jake’s emotional well-being, such as it is.
Although Halloween is All Hollows’ Eve, and tomorrow is All Hollows, or All Saints, Day, Halloween is not actually a day in the church calendar. In the church calendar, today is the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost. Ho-hum. We do however have an option today. In the Protestant churches, today is also Reformation Sunday. Actually, in our drive to be politically correct, we now call it Reformation-Reconciliation Sunday, reconciliation presumably with the Roman Catholic Church. Well, I’m not feeling that politically correct. I don’t want to preach on reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church, although I suppose that as a Protestant minister with a ministry degree from a Catholic university I’m in a better position to do so than most. Still, I’m going to treat this as Reformation Sunday, politically correct or not.
Now, this may sound like a non sequitur, but it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about Paul Tillich up here; and it’s never good to go too long without talking about Paul Tillich, the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century. Actually, it’s not a non sequitur. Tillich in fact has something to say that fits right into Reformation Sunday. Tillich is famous, for among many, many other things, his exposition of what he called The Protestant Principle. He believed that the Protestant Principle makes Protestant Christianity, in theory at least, superior to all other faiths. He believed that the most profound insight of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century had to do not with Christian doctrine or ecclesiology--the theology of the church--although of course the Reformers had profound insights in those areas as well. Rather, Tillich thought that the Reformation’s greatest truth, a truth of which the church in that time had completely lost sight, was this Protestant Principle.
Now, Tillich could be a bit obtuse. His easiest writing is still pretty hard slugging for people not trained in academic theology, or even for people who are. His formulation of the Protestant Principle comes down essentially to this: Only the ultimate is ultimate. Now I’m sure that that apparent tautology is so clear that I can just sit down now and we can move on to the hymn. No? Well, OK. Here’s my best shot at explaining what "only the ultimate is ultimate" means.
"The ultimate" is one of Tillich’s many phrases for God. God for Tillich is that which is truly ultimate, that is, is truly that greater than which nothing can be imagined, to quote Anselm of Canterbury from the 12th century. God is that which is truly transcendent of any created reality. That means that it is idolatry to make any human or any human creation our ultimate concern, to make it that to which we are most devoted, that in which we most place our trust, that which we hold to be the highest good and hold to know and possess absolute truth. Only God can truly be those things, and when we make someone or something else one of those things we commit the profound sin of idolatry. Worse yet for us, we put our trust in someone or something that will in the end fail us because that person or that thing is not truly ultimate, is not truly God.
We humans seem to have hard-wired into us a tendency toward idolatry. We are forever turning something finite, someone mortal, some human creation into God, into the ultimate, into something absolutely and eternally true. The Reformation was to some extent a reaction not only against the horrible abuses in the Roman Catholic church of the time but to the way the church had elevated itself to that position of ultimacy. We Protestants don’t make that mistake today. No. Instead we make the Bible ultimate, and it’s every bit as much a finite, human creation as was the 16th century Roman Catholic Church. Fundamentalist Biblical absolutism is one of the most prevalent forms of idolatry among us today. Most of us "mainline" types aren’t as adamant as the Fundamentalists about it, contenting ourselves with a softer version of this particular idolatry. It’s still idolatry.
The Reformers may not have been wholly aware of that human tendency to idolatry, but they gave us a principle that, if we will just follow it, will help us avoid the error of absolutizing that which is not absolute. It is Tillich’s Protestant Principle, although the Reformers named it with a Latin maxim rather than that English phrase. They said: Semper reformanda! Always reforming, that is, the church must be reforming itself always. It must always be looking to see how further, or new, reformation is required. Reformation is not something that happens once for all. It is something that we must do again and again if we are to avoid the error of turning the church, its doctrines, or its book into God.
There are two images in our Scripture readings this morning that can help us avoid that error. The first comes from Chapter 1 of Isaiah. There, Isaiah reports as the word of the Lord a rejection and even a condemnation of the worship practices, we could say of the church, of that time. To paraphrase: "What is your multitude of sacrifices to me? I’ve had it with your burnt offerings. Get outta here with your offerings and your incense. All that religious stuff means nothing to me!" Now, the point is not that animal sacrifice is the wrong kind of worship. According to the Law of Israel, which Isaiah fully accepted and had no intention of changing, animal sacrifice is the right kind of worship. The point is not that God doesn’t want that kind of worship but that worship of any kind isn’t what God wants. At least, it isn’t what God wants if it is all we offer to God. Isaiah tells us what it is that God really wants from us: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed." When we worship but our worship does not lead us into lives of justice for the poor and oppressed, God finds our worship to be false, to be, in fact, an abomination.
There is a lesson here for our consideration of the Protestant Principle: When the church becomes an end in itself, when what we do here in church becomes an end in itself, we stand in serious need of reformation. We have allowed a human creation, the church, to divert our attention from the demands of God, the demands of the Truly Ultimate. So we need to ask: Does our worship, does our life in the church generally, lead us to live lives committed to peace and justice in God’s world? Does our church lead us to lives of care and concern for the poor, the marginalized and oppressed, and to a commitment to changing the policies and structures that impoverish, marginalize, and oppress them? If not, we are violating the Protestant Principle and stand in need of reformation. And there is no doubt that we do. The church has made the faith so much about life after death, it has so acquiesced in the false distinction between faith and politics, that it much more leads away from a commitment to peace and justice than to such a commitment.
Then there’s Luke’s story of Jesus and Zacchaeus. I don’t want to explore all of that story this morning. There’s a lot in it that deserves attention; but as I read the story this week looking for material for a Reformation Sunday sermon, I was struck by one often-overlooked image. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus--it doesn’t matter for our purposes who he was--was trying to see who Jesus was as Jesus passed through Jericho on his way to confront the powers in Jerusalem. He wanted to see and check out this Jesus fellow; but, as Luke tells us, "on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature." That’s the image that grabbed me. A man who wanted to know Jesus could not discover Jesus because Jesus was surrounded by his followers who kept this seeker from seeing the Christ.
What an apt image that can be for the church! We followers of Jesus can so surround him, can so hem him in with our Christological doctrines and titles that the living Christ can’t be seen. We can so surround him with doctrines about Biblical infallibility, with preconceived notions about who he was and is and about what he did and does that Jesus himself is nowhere to be seen. So we need to ask: Is the church, whose purpose is to connect us with Jesus, in fact keeping us from Jesus? More importantly: Is the church, whose purpose is to bring the Gospel to all people, keeping seekers, keeping people who are not yet followers of Christ but who have a spiritual hunger that Jesus could satisfy from seeing and knowing Christ? If so, we are violating the Protestant Principle and stand in need of Reformation. And there is no doubt that we are. The Church of Jesus Christ has made Christianity so anti-spiritual and anti-intellectual, so rigid and judgmental, so exclusive and doctrinaire that most spiritual seekers run from it as fast and as far as possible. We keep countless Zacchaeuses from seeing, knowing, and coming to Christ.
Today, the Church of Jesus Christ stands in extreme need of a new reformation. We need to reclaim the Protestant Principle and the maxim semper reformanda. We need to reexamine all the ways that we have turned a particular understanding of Christianity into an idol. For a majority of Christians today, particular doctrines of Biblical or ecclesial infallibility and the divinity of Christ, and the notion that Christianity is all about believing the right things now so you can go to heaven when you die have displaced the living Christ and the living God we can know in and through Christ. These things, and not God, have become Christianity’s God. We need a new reformation.
That reformation is already under way. It’s theological basis has been developed in the liberal seminaries and universities over the past hundred years plus. Great popularizers like Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong are bringing those reformed understandings of the faith to an ever-growing audience inside and outside the church. Most Christians don’t know it yet, but we stand at the threshold of a new era in the history of Christianity, nothing less than a new Reformation. The church is being renewed. Let us not be among the crowd that blocks the way to Christ. Amen.